Snippet: Apple Discontinues the Mac Pro with No Plans for Future Hardware ☇

Chance Miller for 9to5Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

I can’t say this is surprising at all—the Mac Pro hasn’t really received many updates in general, but the 2019 redesign to a tower form factor pushed it to even pricier territory (the 2013 “trash can” model started at $2999, the 2019 model started at $5999.) It did join the Apple Silicon era, receiving an M2 Ultra in 2023 and another $1000 price increase. While price isn’t the only metric, it went from being a computer that someone who wanted more flexibility than an iMac and more horsepower than a Mac mini could get to a very high-end workstation. In many ways, the Mac Studio was good enough for many potential Mac Pro buyers and the need for internal expansion has become less and less critical.

In many ways, Apple’s Mac Pro neglect has been happening for years, but there’s been instances of Mac Pros disappearing from displays at Apple Stores or being disconnected. Just last week, I was at the Apple Store in downtown Nashville and a Mac Pro was nowhere to be seen. On top of that, the MacBook Neo’s benchmarks actually best the Mac Pro in single-core performance at 1/11 the price.

Apple probably should’ve discontinued the Mac Pro years ago, maybe with the end of the Intel era. I think the Mac mini and Mac Studio cover the desktop range quite well these days and the clock probably started ticking on the Pro when the Studio was introduced. I think the iMac serves a purpose of being the “ideal” Apple desktop—it’s got a pleasant and simple design, great components, and maybe there’s a little nostalgia that it is one of the products that saved Apple.

Update: One little thing that I came across is that Apple now no longer sells a Mac with expansion slots. While the argument could be made that the 2013-2019 “trash can” Mac Pro also put those slots on hiatus, it did feature upgradeable RAM and storage, as well as a modular card for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Prior to that, the last time no Macs included expansion slots was before the introduction of the Macintosh II and my beloved Macintosh SE.

Snippet: Hide macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons With This One Simple Trick ☇

Speaking of pasting things in the Terminal, Stephen Hackett shares a discovery by Steve Troughton-Smith:

I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. […]

Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters on macOS Tahoe:

defaults write -g NSMenuEnableActionImages -bool NO

I tried this and it certainly helped, although some apps like Safari still have way too many.

Snippet: macOS 26.4 Introduces New Security Feature for Terminal Commands ☇

Joe Rossignol for MacRumors:

macOS Tahoe 26.4 introduces a new security feature that warns Mac users if they paste certain commands in the Terminal app that may be harmful.

For those unaware, the Terminal app allows you to enter text commands to perform tasks on your Mac. Terminal is primarily intended for advanced users and developers, but unfortunately casual users can be tricked into entering harmful commands that can permanently delete files, change user permissions, and cause other problems.

Here is what the warning says when it appears:

Possible malware, Paste blocked

Your Mac has not been harmed.
Scammers often encourage pasting text into Terminal to try and harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.

These instructions are commonly offered via websites, chat agents, apps, files, or a phone call.

There is a “Paste Anyway” option if you wish to proceed.

It’s always a delicate balance how much users should be allowed to mess up on their own computers and how much the operating system should keep them from doing something stupid. It’s really easy to go overboard and have too many warnings and confirmation dialog boxes. There are moments where macOS feels that way, although Windows Vista is still the go-to punchline for this behavior. I think in this case, Apple balanced it perfectly—keep users from doing potentially dangerous things, while educating them and still allowing them to proceed. I wondered if they could’ve read the clipboard and then decided if the command in question would be harmful, but so many can be innocuous unless you’re in a certain location or have certain flags in what is being pasted.

Snippet: The Neo Cannot Scale with macOS Behind on the Basics ☇

Alex Potenza:

So what’s going on here? Why isn’t the incredible hardware meaningfully moving the needle? As far as I can tell, the issues are mostly software problems in two forms: hardware-compatibility failures, and parts of macOS that still lag behind competitors. At scale, these small mismatches become policy problems. They turn into rollout issues, retraining, accessory replacement, and extra support tickets.

I keep running into these problems myself when I show up to a hot desk with a Mac, and I keep seeing them when other people use my Mac. The interesting people are not anti-Apple diehards, but longtime iPhone users who otherwise like Apple products and still get tripped up by Macs. I wrote about many of these same issues when Ventura came out in 2022. The striking part is how many of the same screenshots and complaints still apply now almost half a decade later.

I really enjoyed this piece because it gave me some things to think about—I found plenty to agree and disagree with. For context, I work in IT at a PC-only environment, but also have the only Mac in the building. Despite SoC limitations for multiple displays, my M1 MacBook Pro could push enough pixels to run two 1080p displays easily, yet it can’t. Our even older, less-powerful HPs from our loaner pool can, despite struggling at a lot of other things. I don’t see why Apple couldn’t bake in DisplayPort MST and proper DisplayLink support (instead of forcing you to use a third-party driver.) This gets an easy win for working in a PC environment.

Some of Potenza’s interface-related suggestions to make macOS more like Windows seem to fall under the “it’s different and that needs to change” because Apple doesn’t do things like Microsoft. For any longtime Mac user, it would be pretty easy to create a similar list of things Windows does differently than macOS and feels cumbersome. I think for both, it’s a mix of areas for improvement and what the user is used to. Only you can figure out where that line feels for you.

Maybe it’s because I’ve primarily used a Mac from System 6 days, but I find some of the previews when switching between apps to be more cluttered and cumbersome in Windows 11. I tend to think of things in terms of where they’re living, rather than a single task I’m accomplishing across different pieces of software. Some of this is a fundamental difference in macOS and Windows—macOS has always encouraged overlapping windows and working with them in a floating manner, while Windows has had a “maximize” button to kick something to full screen from the early days. I’m old enough to remember the old hierarchy where all windows for documents would be contained within their parent program window. In some ways, the task-centric approach that Potenza suggests is more akin to macOS’s structure of overlapping multiple windows, just maybe less intentionally so.

I agree that Apple made some questionable, arguably detrimental decisions with the interface in macOS 26 Tahoe, but if they were to just duplicate everything the way Windows works in the future, it wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea either. You’d risk alienating longtime Mac users to chase commodity market share. Would you rather have customers that choose your product because it’s unique or something that could easily be swapped for one of many competitors? Most business PCs are bought because they can plug into an existing Active Directory/Intune/etc. environment and work as expected. If an enterprise switches between Dell, HP, or Lenovo, a majority of users won’t necessarily care unless there are problems, such as an unreliable model. I think Apple may be happy to slowly chip away where they can, but ensure they keep their existing user base.

Snippet: I Am In an Abusive Relationship with the Technology Industry ☇

Salma Alam-Naylor (via Robb Knight):

You simply cannot breathe without seeing, hearing, or engaging in any kind of technical conversation about AI. AI has dominated the Zeitgeist so catastrophically that the only way to escape is to turn off the WiFi and delete all the apps. Every single piece of fucking software has some kind of shitty AI add-on, forced into your face at regular intervals whilst you’re trying to go about your life or do your job or check your email or write an email or read an email or talk to a human support agent or read a recipe or open an issue on an open-source project or watch a YouTube video or open your IDE or do a fucking internet search. The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.

The amount of AI mandates that I’ve come across is staggering when the people making the royal decrees often have no plan of action or use case. It’s simply fear because someone told them their company will immediately die if they miss out on AI. I think that there will be use cases, but if you replaced “AI” in these conversations with any other past tech trends or software, it would feel absurd:

• If you’re not using Microsoft Excel, you’ll definitely be left behind!
• Every employee must have a multimedia strategy!
• Move to the cloud or else you won’t be productive!

These all have use cases and have been transformative in some ways, but none would apply to every aspect of every business. Perhaps we ought to find the useful applications of AI and push back/hope that the hype cycle runs its course.